Author: William Gallagher

My perfect holiday: working away

Posted by

0

Now this is what we want. Stuff working smarter – Never Mind the Quantity (27 February, 2014) – just take holidays where you bring your work with you. Bliss.

Everybody is used to taking a vacation from work, but what about taking a vacation to work? That’s exactly what one company is offering their employees: They’ll give you $2,000 to go anywhere you want, and work like you’re in the office…

Citing the “dreary” winter conditions across most of the country, the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has come up with a new program for its hard-working attorneys. It will give attorneys $2,000 to go “anywhere in the world” with a group of their colleagues for a week. During that week, they’re expected to work just as hard as they would be if they were at the office. But they can be working from a swim-up bar in Grand Cayman, or a beach in Phuket if they like.

Sure You Can Take A Vacation — As Long As You Continue To Work – ATLredline

Hat tip to Lifehacker for finding this.

Zippy To Do app watches what you do

Posted by

0

You would need Primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to get me away from using OmniFocus as my To Do manager but that doesn’t mean it has an exclusive on all good ideas. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes I can be rather tempted. Today that temptation is an iOS app called Zippy and it’s because of what it does besides remind you of tasks.

Zippy is the simplest and quickest way to manage tasks and reminders. It provides you with Insights on your habits to help you get better at managing and completing tasks. Here’s what the infographic shows you:

• How many tasks you’ve completed and how many on time
• Completion breakdown by completed early, on time and late
• How far ahead you plan out your tasks and how close to completion time you finish them
• What time of day you’re best at planning and finishing tasks
• Weekday breakdown of when you create and complete your tasks
• How many times you snooze tasks

Zippy on the App Store

I’m not saying I’d like to be told how long it takes me to do a task – Zippy reports the average time from entering a task to ticking it as done – but I’m terribly curious. Not enough to swap from OmniFocus but enough to be very tempted.

If you fancy it too, get it now. Zippy is on sale for 69p UK or 99c US until 4 March. Get it on the iTunes App Store.

Forbes magazine on WhatsApp

Posted by

0

I’d say that you don’t go easily from zero to being bought by Facebook for $19billon but actually you just don’t go there at all. Maybe that will change now that the social media firm’s payout for WhatsApp has set a bar for how much companies will pay for technology they need, but it’s still a dizzying amount. So dizzying that one can spend longer thinking about the cash than about how WhatsApp got there. Forbes has the story and it is a very interesting, even inspirational, read.

Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook earlier today. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp’s discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the  railroad tracks, the former North County Social Services office where Koum, 37, once stood in line to collect food stamps. That’s where the three of them inked the agreement to sell their messaging phenom –which brought in a miniscule $20 million in revenue last year — to the world’s largest social network.

Exclusive: The Rags-To-Riches Tale Of How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp Into Facebook’s New $19 Billion Baby – Forbes

Do note that Forbes is an excruciating site to read: you’ll have to schlep through popups to get to the text and there’s a semi-permanent floating ad that cuts down how much you can see at once. If you’re reading on Safari on a Mac, this is why the Reader mode is needed.

Evil laugh

Posted by

0

Break the rules. It’s official. Lying and cheating are good for you. Or at least they are good for creativity. Or at least there’s a connection between being creative and being a lying, thieving, cheating, scumbag. Allegedly.

We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: They both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in this research).

Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity

That’s not the most readable piece you could find today: it’s from an academic paper written by Francesca Gino from Harvard Business School and Scott S. Wiltermuth from the Marshall School of Business in the University of Southern California.

But this may be the most readable: check out the Lifehacker article on this because it also links out to that productivity site’s own series of ‘evil’ projects.

 

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/18/0956797614520714.abstract

It’s the journey, not the finishing line

Posted by

0

I think I’ll probably always listen to what an astronaut says but this comment is particularly good. Chris Hadfield:

If you view crossing the finish line as the measure of your life, you’re setting yourself up for a personal disaster. There are very very very few people who win gold at the Olympics. And if you say, ‘if I don’t win gold then I’m a failure or I’ve let somebody down or something,’ .. What if you win a silver? What if you win a bronze? What if you come fourth? What if your binding comes apart? … What if all of those millions of things that happen in life happen. … Only a few people that go there are going to win gold. And it’s the same in some degree I think in commanding a spaceship or doing a spacewalk it is a very rare, singular moment-in-time event in the continuum of life. And you need to honour the highs and the peaks in the moments — you need to prepare your life for them — but recognize the fact that the preparation for those moments is your life and, in fact, that’s the richness of your life. … The challenge that we set for each other, and the way that we shape ourselves to rise to that challenge, is life.

Don’t Aim for the Finishing Line – Farnam Street

Read the whole piece to also see a video of Hadfield saying it.

This rather fits in with both the idea that it takes time to grow a business – The 1,000 Day Rule (28 February, 2014) – and that maybe we shouldn’t focus so much on goals – Don’t Plan So Much (27 February). It’s also true of drama: if the only interesting thing about a story is the ending, like discovering whodunnit at the end of a thriller, then it’s not drama. It’s more a puzzle.

And if I were to go all Hallmark-Card-like about it, I’d say that the ending is one day and the journey is a lifetime, we should enjoy the lifetime. I can’t believe I just said that.

Bless maths: it really is better to buy bigger pizzas

Posted by

0

If you can think of a productivity excuse for telling you this, I’m all ears. But I’m thinking of all those all-day and late-night writing sessions when you know that healthy, decent, good food is absolutely the last thing you need. You want calories and you want them in a handy form that you can wedge in your gob in the most efficient way.

So we’re talking pizza. And I cannot believe I didn’t realise this before, but it is true that the bigger the pizza, the better value it is. By far.

The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.

And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.

74,746 Reasons You Should Always Get the Bigger Pizza – Planet Money

Planet Money is on the NPR website: America’s National Public Radio. It’s the nearest equivalent the US has to BBC Radio 4 and I’m a fan for its great music programming. But it is American so naturally its statistics are for America. So while you know that the maths is the same here for the size, we don’t have the same level of research into pricing in the UK.

Someone’s going to have to try every pizza in every restaurant in the UK. I’m up for the challenge.

 

The 1,000 day rule

Posted by

1

You know the idea that if you just work on something for 10,000 hours you will be great at it. Please check back with me in hour 9,999 and we’ll talk again. I’m less cynical about the number 1,000 and specifically an idea that it takes a thousand days to make your business work.

Any number is bollocks, really, so if you are on day 1 or day 999 and things don’t look like they’re on track, I wouldn’t lose sleep. But this is one of those ideas where the point of the number is not to plant a stick in the ground and say this is the finishing line. It’s to say that the finishing line is way over there, it isn’t on your first day or at the end of your first month.

Dan from TropicalMBA claims:

I was chatting with my friend David from Greenback Tax Services the other day about these misconceptions. I said: “people don’t understand they need to be poor for 1000 days.” Our basic hypothesis: you’ll be doing worse than you were at your job for 1000 days after you start your muse business. I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times. For many of us it’s been almost exactly those 1000 days it took for us to get back to the level of income we enjoyed in our corporate days.

The 1,000 Day Rule: What Living the Dream Really Looks Like

He then goes on to outline what many of those 1,000 days looks like on the way.

Love Tuesdays, they’re your best day

Posted by

0

Seriously. Apparently seriously. If you work a typical Monday-Friday week then you can guess that Monday is a day for recovering from the weekend, if you don’t love your job, or catching up on everything you’ve missed since Friday, if you do. It’s also a documented fact that website traffic goes up on Friday afternoons as office workers plan what they’re going to do next weekend.

So we’re already two days down in the hunt for the most productive time of the week. The Toronto Star reports that a survey by Accountemps says Wednesdays and Thursdays are okay, but Tuesday wins. Easy:

In the survey of more than 300 Canadian human resources managers, 33 per cent said productivity accelerated on Tuesdays versus the least productive Thursdays and Fridays, which polled in at 5 and 6 per cent, respectively.

Wednesdays were the next most productive according to 23 per cent, while Mondays rated a 14 per cent response and no particular day drew 18 per cent.

“There’s limiting distractions,” said Accountemps senior staffing manager Vitaly Melnik of the midweek peak.

“You’ve got your head focused after the weekend is over; you’ve caught up on everything; and you can do your regular work schedule most effectively. Then, after the hump of the Wednesday, come Thursday, Friday, you’re already thinking about the weekend. ”

The Toronto Star

Hat tip to Lifehacker for the link.

 

Location, Location, Location

Posted by

0

Last May I was writing a huge book about Blake’s 7 plus a two-hour Doctor Who radio drama and a short one-act stage play for the Birmingham Rep. As you do. That’s actually the little cauldron I was in when I thought of The Blank Screen and so started writing that book at the same time. You can of course argue about the quality of my work – Doctor Who: Scavenger comes out next month so you can even hear it for yourself – and I did use half a dozen productivity tools to handle it all. But one that really helped was that I moved around.

I wrote Blake’s 7 in my office on a 27in iMac. I wrote the Doctor Who on my MacBook Pro, mostly in my living room. And then while this wasn’t as hard-and-fast, I did write at least some of the play on my iPad in the kitchen.

It got so I associated certain rooms and machines with certain projects. The Blank Screen is definitely an iPad book: I wrote that going everywhere, starting with the first thousand words on a bus ride to go see my mother. But Blake’s 7 is definitely an iMac: I say this to you and I can see it. My Word document open here, an episode of the show there or audio from an interview or a scanned document from the BBC Written Archives there.

I don’t think I ever told any of my editors or producers this, but in my head if I had to call them about something, I would first go to the room and the machine that I associated with that.

This was entirely a contrivance. The complete text and all notes for all of these projects were always on all of these machines at the same time. I could and when necessary did start a sentence of one book on one machine and finish it on another.

And at every place I also read RSS news. So I don’t know why it’s taken me ten months to find out that other people benefit from this madness too. ImpossibleHQ calls it Workstation Popcorn. Meh. But the ideas in their article about it fit what worked for me and they go further. Literally. This bunch recommends dividing your day’s tasks into groups and then physically moving to different locations between each set:

Once you finish all the tasks in group #1, get up and move. Close your tabs, pack your bags, and physically move your butt to your next spot. If you can, walk or bike to your next stop. Avoid driving if you can. The physical activity is important.

Workstation Popcorn – ImpossibleHQ

Hmm. I’m a writer, we’re supposed to be sedentary. But biking advice aside, there’s a lot to like in this piece and quite a bit to think about. Also a lot to wade through, but have a good go.

Never mind the quantity – why working smarter is better than harder

Posted by

1

This hits me in the stomach: I am so used to working all the time, constantly working. I cope better with rejection than I do with relaxation. But the more I’ve had to do as my career has grown and as I’ve started thinking about the productivity tools I’ve developed or that I’ve gleefully stolen, I’m changing. I work fewer hours now but I get more done and while I’m still figuring this out, it’s already clear that a lot of is down to how effectively I work.

Whenever I have something on my mind, I seem to find it everywhere in front of me too. So I’m not surprised that I was drawn across the space and time of the internet to the 99U site where they in their turn had found The Creativity Post. That’s a site that offers advice on this very issue. Specifically, it lists 21 tips to ensure you’re working smarter, not harder.

I loathe list journalism and I’ll give you why:

1) It’s easy and empty to just pick a number and write to it

b) It’s a kind of click bait where what they could say in one paragraph is split across pages just to get you to click

iii) I can’t think of a third thing and often enough, neither can any list journalist. But it doesn’t stop them.

In this case, I think we can make a ready exception because that number 21 feels calculated rather than a stab in the dark. And because this is all on one page. And because I think the The Creative Post comments make a lot of sense. Here’s one , for instance:

9. Delineate a time limit in which to complete task.

Instead of just sitting down to work on a project and thinking, “I’m going to be here until this is done,” try thinking, “I’m going to work on this for three hours”. The time constraint will push you to focus and be more efficient, even if you end up having to go back and add a bit more later.

Work Smarter Not Harder – The Creativity Post

Obviously I recommend you read the lot. And I’m also exploring The Creativity Post in general now. But let us also tip a hat to 99U for finding it for me.